The wind blows in by Asako Shiroki

About

Asako Shiroki’s work appears enigmatically stark in its utilitarian forms and untreated materials. Perhaps confounding at first glance, over time it reveals certain rhythm through repetition and extension. The ‘tempo’ of an object often seems to be based on an alternative standard, as if in anamorphic perspective or viewed from an alternative dimension to the world we live in. Its presence is gentle, co-existing in our environment, invoking familiar forms. Yet in this distorted familiarity lies a disruption of human scales of thinking, evoking a recollection of fragmented memories.

Originally trained in silversmithing, Shiroki moved on to working in wood. She describes this natural material as simultaneously confrontational, adaptable, and a means to explore the temporal process of bringing form to raw material. The performative act of working the wood crystallises in the exhibition space as an installation, choreographed in physical relationships, balance, and tensions between shapes. Shiroki respects the ephemeral nature of reality and how metamorphosis takes place in our environment; she reflects fragility and strength through her practice. Henceforth her works can be dismantled to lie dormant until they are ready to be re-assembled.

One day I was walking on the street, I found the shapes of the twigs charming. As I had one of them in my hand, I spotted a bird’s nest over my head. It was a moment of intervention in a process of rational collection, or of destined accumulation, and it was a moment of discovering passages, and the interweaving of different worlds. The engaging shape of the twig was the connection between autonomous existences. I felt that our human lives coexist with many different layers of the world.

The wind blows in, her first UK solo show at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, features the work A twig of interweaving passages, originally commissioned by Schmuck2 in Retschow. This was Shiroki’s first work shown in public space and signalled a new dimension to her practice. Collecting found ephemeral objects from her surroundings – pretzels, feathers, twigs – transformed in bronze, her work allows intervention from nature, but reflects it into an inverse perspective on the world. Requisitioning elements of the constructed environment, the installation develops the artist’s acute sensibility for materials and the exploration of the tension between nature and dwelling. Her work sets an equilibrium to nature, an arbitrary set of standards, recognition, histories, technique or our embedded culture with our perceptions.